Eff

Trying to find a rational reason why potatoes should have vanished but maize remained is a fool's errand- maize was embedded too deeply to be winkled out with other New World crops and plants.

I mean, yes, the Dragonfight rules allow for a flawless defeat of the Bat, assuming the Bat doesn't make its Heroic Escape roll. Same thing for the Doom Run, which is what I was thinking of as "guy and his dog versus giant monster bat" for the smallest quantity of people that could no-sell the Bat.

To my recollection, the Bat is a relatively strong but far from invincible unit when it's a cardboard wargaming chit. Ethilrist + the Hound stand a good chance of instantly killing the Bat off, for example, let alone massed missile fire + a substantial melee presence. You lose a unit, of course, to that pesky Chaotic magic but sending the Bat alone against the Lunar Empire doesn't end well for the chiropteran Hero.

You could even go further and allow for spells to be cast according to an "affinity" that's detached from specific Runes, allowing for Orlanth cultists to use Rain from Heler based on a shared weather affinity, while making it somewhat more difficult to access water magic that's not about the weather. Just as a hypothetical.

The green crown from Six Ages resembles an articulated chitinous shell to me, so it may represent an Underworld being Shargash fought and defeated in the course of becoming the Sun of Hell, but with the vibrant color of life. Or a patron, friend, or lover, of course. Just like with the phoenix crown, with fenghuangs and dragons adorning the sides and top.

To my (limited, so very limited) understanding, there's a distinction made between the early zāhid ascetics and later Sufis by Sufi practitioners on the basis that the former practiced asceticism from fear of God or expectation of paradise, while the latter practice their asceticism from love of God. Which gets right at the beautiful ambiguity of "submission", doesn't it?

One of the genuinely fascinating things about Ompalam as a concept is that the "official" position is that Ompalam is not Chaotic, which carries a wide range of potential implications. But I have rarely seen anyone give this more than a passing nod before diving right into the older conception of Ompalam and slavery as Chaotic, like the Roman rote definition of slavery as "the state that is recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person, contrary to nature." With that said, I don't generally spend much time exploring slavery in Glorantha in play because of how bleak the subject is and the way in which the existing backdrop material is facially rigged such that slavery is presented as inevitable, necessitating a great deal of preparatory work, even before touching on the racialized aspects. So, like Ikadz, Ompalam's Chaotic-or-not status is irrelevant, as both of them are banished to my Glorantha-4 anew whenever I'm reminded of their existence. So here's my dumb theory: Ompalam is equated with the Invisible God because Ompalam represents a collapse of the dichotomy of Chaotic/not-Chaotic. If Ompalam is Chaotic, then what is thrall-taking? What is debt-peonage? What does that say about those dancing girls in the royal palace? Do they have a 401(k)? What are the terms of their employment contract? But if Ompalam is not Chaotic, then does that not imply that slavery is natural, inevitable, and eternal within Glorantha? That the gods looked upon the sight of human beings stripped of humanity, then waved away Alter Creature and focused on those who were reduced to property, and smiled? How might we abolish slavery within Glorantha if this sleazy motherfucker has his place there? So Ompalam remains too terrible to approach, much like the Invisible God, while retaining selfhood and individuality. To get within the Ompalam palace, you need to, well, you need to discard those things, don't you? Whew.

Death is a sword. Death cuts things apart and cuts them off. Death carries connotations of asceticism and isolation. Food preservation requires isolating the food from the forces of spoilage and waste- vermin that eat it, parasites that grow in it, the invisible spirits of rot and decay. So- + together, which is Babeester Gor, as a way to preserve the products of . Mythological thinking, and also the recognition that there's more to Babs than just "stacking corpses".

That's certainly one interpretation, one which might be difficult to avoid if you spend too long looking at old Grazelander chits. My own interpretation swerves off in an entirely different direction, though, because I interpret the relationships with the terrain as necessarily bilateral social ones in Glorantha, through nymphs, genii loci, dryads, dragons and giants also being mountains, and so on.

I feel like the "Grain Goddesses" probably do teach their own unarticulated version of Food Song, or many such versions, for properly preparing food for consumption. I go back and forth on whether they or Babeester Gor teach the Food Song that stabilizes food for long-term storage. Soaking acorns to make them edible, properly shucking maize ears, tapping rice off of a wild rice plant (though perhaps it's Shargash/Tolat who shows you that specific rhythm), knowing what proportions of wheat to barley to use for what type of flour, and what kinds of either... all of that is, in its own way, arcane knowledge if you're not in a community where it's done regularly. Just look at the question of whether to wash rice or not! Is this something that's interestingly gameable? Well... yes, I think so, I've contemplated basic scenarios where it would be relevant, (Ernalda priestess attempts to raise rice for Lunars caught in Handra by the Dragonrise, for one) but it's also better to keep in the background for the kind of play most people are interested in.

A potential factor for consideration here is that there's quite a lot of flexibility of interpretation of what forms Orlanthi societies can take. Is a clan a unit of 1-4 villages that take up a contiguous patch of land? Is a clan a collection of a (home)steads with a central "town" area that holds the sacred precincts? Is a clan centered in a single village with outlying (home)steads and urban representatives in towns and cities? Is a clan a group of people spread out across a number of proximate settlements where they live with people from other clans? The assumptions between and within texts vary between the first three, with the fourth not explicitly excluded. And in turn, urban settlement patterns are of course going to be built atop these rural settlement patterns. Is a "market town" specifically a junction point between clans, or is it a concentration of people where it's convenient for access? Does a "natural" city develop from clustering homesteads, from villages merging, or from the construction of particular multi-clan structures and the economic development of certain services? How far does the clan structure reach? Are there bloodlines without clans, or truly clanless people? What's the status of outlaws, or of cultists of Humakt and Babeester Gor who have "severed" their kin ties, if that's still a factor in your Gloranthas? Should we read "house" in Esrolia or the Lunar Empire as license to give them house societies, a la Levi-Strauss? Or nascent class-based societies? Sartar itself feels like it must or ought to be unusual, since the Dragonkill obliterated most of the humanlike relationships to the terrain and then Sartar itself is the product of settlement, of attempting to transform or eliminate the relationships the "nonhumans" of Dragon Pass and the Pony Breeders had. Its cities are all planned ones in origin. I could well imagine a vast gulf once you cross the Deathline between northern Heortland and southern Sartar, or perhaps a borderland between the two settlement patterns. These are mostly food for thought, of course.

Pretty sure I've been to one of those, frequently, and it's nice, you frequently run into Susan Sontag and Christopher Isherwood, and who wouldn't want that in a fantasy roleplaying game, but if there's a serious question up for dispute, things take quite a while to resolve, and it gets really slow if there's more than a bilateral negotiation necessary. Those paired d10s are flawed in some ways, just like those paired d20s and those APs and MPs and HPs and other HPs, but they do have their advantages at times.

It is worth pointing out, though, that the Epic of Gilgamesh (and probably the Bilgamesh poems unless they significantly antedate Ur III) postdate this state of affairs- they were composed when lugal, ensi, and en had become hierarchical titles. I think it might be worth looking at this as a "primordial", "green-age" state of affairs which Lunar society may attempt to recreate (pulling out the Entekosiad and expanding the premise of what its T&Js mean) but which must struggle against the Curse of Buseryan, he who babbled the thoughts of humans with writing so that they could never again build a ziggurat tall enough for the Sun to descend herself into the world, but instead could only rest upon it as a footstool. (Note for the unwary reader: that entire "Curse of Buseryan" is something I extemporized just now from a mix of Snow Crash, Symphogear, and the Torah. Please, for the love of Sedenya, don't go haring off looking for Gloranthan sources on this.)

RQ-with-the-lizard-and-lady-on-the-cover has a very specific objective for the game, and a specific intent behind that objective. You play a sword-and-sorcery fucko, who's on a quest to get themselves a Rune or two. Not to mention that the lead on producing RQ was Steve Perrin, with Ray Turney then coming on, and Francis Gregory Stafford taking a less direct role in making the specifics of the game. All of which is to say that there are a couple of reasons why this vision of daily life isn't a part of the Runequest-with-L&L milieu- one, the mode is one where you're playing someone at least partially divorced from everyday life, and two, there are multiple creative voices working here. Now, fast forward to the 1990s, when Hero Wars emerges, and it does validate this view of the setting, with the common magic even children might have, but also there the creative voices had changed in makeup- FGS was decades older, and to my understanding the division of responsibilities between FGS, Robin Laws, and other contributors was significantly different. And Hero Wars in turn has a somewhat different intent and objective. All of this is to say that there are clear limits to this kind of backward reasoning and picking out the envisioned intent of Gre(at)(g)S(is)t(affo)(e)r(d) from it.

A fasces has all the sticks in order, these are more like tumbleweeds. The business end of a broom duplicated over itself.

The vajra or thunderbolt began as a sling bullet, and then mutated spontaneous into a mace or club, with a ribbed head. As Buddhism carried the thunderbolt north and east, the head doubled, the ribs became prongs, and a whole family of thunderbolt types emerged, sometimes merging with the bell to produce bells with prongs on the handle, and Tantric ways proceeded to assign a great deal of symbolism to this shape. To contrast, the Hellenistic thunderbolt is irregular in shape, a bunch of sticks tied together but sticking out at all angles, though a triune profile seems fairly common on coins (along with pentuple ones) and is probably a missile, a javelin or a thrown object. In turn, the western Levantine understanding is that thunder is speech, a voice pronouncing a curse or an exclamation. The vajra is also called a "diamond scepter", so we perhaps must conclude that thunder and thunderbolts are passed around casually and loosely, almost slatternly.

The pattern is that these spirit magic spells come from a variety of implicit understandings of what spirit magic is and from the basic practical aspects of magic. Preserve Herbs would be utterly useless if it followed the basic "grammar" of spirit magic or Rune magic, summoning spells similarly, so they break the "rules" of the system. A cohesive grammar would require a broad reframing of the system- perhaps these kinds of enduring magic should be sorcery, if we're wedded to 2 minutes/15 minutes as the spirit/Rune magic duration, but it would also be quite bizarre for preserving herbs to require literacy and experiences of henosis and divine gnosis, as apparently sorcery is meant to be. This does make it hard to design your own spirit magic spells, just like you could in RQ2, but perhaps that's a feature, not a bug? 🤔

This, I declare, is ideology.

There is absolutely no difference between the two in terms of acceptability, to my mind. Whichever source you draw from, Thunder Rebels or the myths Stafford and others wrote as background for Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe as collected in The Book of Heortling Mythology, you're still drawing from the well of an older version of the setting with significantly different cosmology and outlook as to how to interact with that setting, and part and parcel of that cosmology and that outlook is a particular "anthropological" way of building out the setting from its base setup which produced Durev, Voudisea the Lance Goddess, Enferalda, and all the rest. So one answer is to try and take those bits and bobs which you enjoy or find intriguing and work them into a shape that fits into the cosmology and outlook of Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Good luck, have fun, it will almost certainly be an uphill struggle given the formation of RQG as a reaction to Hero Wars and Heroquest, but it's an option. Another answer, of course, is to simply fork Glorantha from that Hero Wars vision and present your own alternate developed vision, whether explicitly or implicitly, in Jonstown Compendium products. This probably won't sell well, but perhaps there are people who feel underserved by the current vision who would appreciate it. And then a third option is to simply do your own thing without selling it, and present it publicly or not, without commercialization. Many choices.

It's not hard to find some resonances of ZZBR's sigil if you look, though it does suggest some fascinating resonances for ZZBR himself. (Is there a way to turn "ZZBR" into "BLVTSKY" or appropriate reduction? Without having to do three impossible things before breakfast?)

Most of the difficulties people are struggling with here are an artifact of presuming that each cult must have one object of worship. But let's say you have subcults, and people can engage with these gods within the structure of the broader Yelmalio or Ernalda or Orlanth cult. This makes it easier to cope with how these blue-collar skills, like carpentry and weaving, can have a continuum between their aspect as everyday tasks and their aspect as specialized trades which require a lot of specialized knowledge. Or, alternately, we can say that these are inherently simple tasks anyone can do, and carry no "magic", no secret power associated with being initiated and learned in the secrets of the task. Which I personally think is a bunch of hooey, but you do you, everyone has their own Glorantha and their own understanding of what "magic" means in it.

The same could be said of "animal stuff", that too is not integrated into our consciousness as a separable quantity. Human consciousness, though it may be partible into components that emerged at different points in our evolutionary history, can only ever be defined in species terms as "human". It is, however, a metaphor of instrumental use.

From the inclusion of fungi and algae (and cyanobacteria) in the umbrella of the Plant rune, indicating that it can't be treated as equivalent to the real-world kingdom of life. So perhaps it's a question of shapes, or perhaps it's a question of general life pattern of "passive feeding", or similar, but the precise details are less important than the problematized nature of "human" once you expand that out beyond . Even in terms of psychology, if we can classify certain things as "beast psychology" for we can surely classify things as "plant psychology" for . It does disrupt those nice paired Traits, though.

So is denoted as a shape, and has been a condition or modifier as recently as the Guide but may instead be a personal rune now, judging by the procedural rhetoric of smiley codes. What that would mean, taken directly and simply, is that is something that can be applied to , , , , , presumably others, and also . You can be a dragon and a hominid, a dragon and an animal, a dragon and a plant, a spirit dragon, a chaos dragon, and of course, a dragonewt dragon. This has some shockingly radical implications, but luckily RQG with its visions of natural essences tamps them down by keeping Dragon well away from the character sheet. Now with that said, I find myself somewhat bemused by the thought that shapes are somehow absolutely mutually exclusive when humans have as well, and if that's because of real-world biology, they should also have because of mitochondria, intestinal flora, etc., because they do have a latent potential to become a bodiless spirit... but that's the trouble of a game mechanic that ostensibly represents pure psychology getting tangled up in metaphysics.

Glorantha is Glorantha. What would it mean for her to use all of her body and there still to be a lozenge at the end of it? Of course, with that Jungian Cosmic Man archetype, there's a straightforward problem that dogs us down to the present day and the realm of scientific cosmology- what is "nothing"? The disassembly of Ymir or Pangu is the culmination of a process that doesn't begin with vacuum or absence, but with formlessness, incoherence. The infinite cold of Niflheimr and the infinite heat of Muspelheimr meet and create Ymir and Audumbla. The formless mass of generic stuff coalesces into an egg, separates into yin and yang, and the interplay of the two generates Pangu. The world was chaotic waters, and the breath/wind/spirit of YHVH moved on the face of the waters and made the earth from them. Izanagi and Izanami, youngest of the generations of primordial gods, churn the gelatinous oil-slick of the earth with a jewelled spear from heaven, and then the salt drying from the brine makes the first island. The universe expands from a singularity to its current state over some time between 10 and 20 billion years. In all of this, there are transformations and transmutations, but the connection to the primordial state of disorganization remains. The aesir have their shameful connection to the autofertilization of Ymir, the Four Heavenly Beasts aid Pangu in growing to encompass the world and remain to this day, the great serpents of the chaotic waters remain in their depths to this day, and the ways of the underworld and of the dead were the way they are before Izanami died. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation glows for those who have eyes to see wavelengths in the single-digit millimeters. So what would death mean in such an exalted context? What kind of transformation is that, if we take it that Glorantha is dead? And a followup question: in all of these mythologies, there is a primordial multiplicity of entities. Even Ein Sof is an unstable state that condenses to produce the separate tzimtzum, the conceptual space of differentiation of selfhood. Who was hanging with Glorantha/AS when she organized herself into the basic lozengitudinal shape?